Serendipity Green (30 page)

25

“I can't believe you've never been in PA,” Buzzy says to Zee Levant as they zip along the top of a long Pennsylvania mountain in the Serendipity Green® Volvo station wagon the dealer in Great Neck, Long Island gave Hugh Harbinger. Hugh, stretched out on the back seat, hasn't made a peep since they crossed the Hudson. Neither has Matisse, who's curled up in wicker laundry basket in the wagon part of the station wagon.

Zee is not the least bit ashamed of never being in Pennsylvania before. But she counterattacks anyway. “I can't believe you have.”

Buzzy loves her counterattack. “How many states have you actually been in, Zee? Not flown over. Actually been in?”

She thinks. “New York. Connecticut. Massachusetts. California. Colorado. Hawaii. And now New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”

Buzzy loves it. “That's it? Eight states? You are some American, Zee.”

“And how many have you been in?” she asks.

“Forty-two. Forty-three when we get to Ohio.”

Zee Levant is stunned. “Why?”

Buzzy loves her snobbery. “OK. How many countries?”

She doesn't have to think about this one. “All the ones everybody's been to, of course: France. England. Ireland. Belgium. Luxembourg. Monaco. Germany. Denmark. Sweden. Czechoslovakia. Austria. Morocco. Italy and Greece. Israel. Egypt. Turkey. Spain and Portugal. India. Mexico. Cuba. Brazil. Japan. Thailand. Singapore. New Zealand. How many is that?”

“I'm not counting.”

“And, let's see: Belize. Mali. Zimbabwe. Tonga. Togo. Poland. Latvia. Hungry. Lebanon. China. Mongolia. Figi. Uganda. Kenya—Buzzy, Buzzy, Buzzy! This is so boring! I've never been in the front seat of a car this long in my life. How long until Cleveland?”

“Another eight hours, I think.”

“We could fly to Prague in eight hours.”

It's cloudy up here on the mountain top. In the valley the sunlight is brilliant, though there's nothing worth a damn down there worth illuminating. “Do we dare stop for lunch?” Buzzy asks.

“Yes we do,” answers Zee. ‘I'm absolutely hollow. What's the next city?”

Buzzy fumbles for the map folded over his crotch like a loin cloth and hands it to his co-pilot. Having once driven a Land Rover across Kazakhstan, she has no trouble finding their exact location. “Bloomsburg? There wouldn't be anything remotely Mediterranean in a town called Bloomsburg.”

Buzzy loves it. They drive on.

Buzzy, Zee Levant and Hugh Harbinger are speeding west in the Serendipity Green® Volvo because last night, during a book launch for famous South Carolina novelist Kwame Oyo at Café Ru Ru, Hugh, sucking woozily on a fifty-dollar contraband Cuban cigar, all of a sudden decided to give the Gangrene Velveeta, as he's been calling the big boxy wagon since it was delivered on Monday, to Bob and Eleanor Hbracek. He'd drive it to Ohio himself, he decided. And Buzzy and Zee Levant, afraid it was just a ruse for him to commit suicide in the middle-of-nowhere, decided they'd better come along. And so now Buzzy is driving and Zee Levant is running her fingers along the map, and the color genius responsible for this lunacy is flat on his back in the back seat.

Buzzy and Zee have every reason to believe that Hugh Harbinger might take his life. He's been skidding since Koko returned from Morocco with seventy-seven shades of white. For weeks now he's had no interest in restaurants or sex or art galleries or deriding the middle class. For weeks now he's been sitting at Zee's Bjorn Dahlstrom breakfast table, feet up on her Sori Yanagi chairs, Matisse asleep in his lap, a can of warm Pepsi in his hand, looking down at the little people in Central Park.

They have tried everything to get his mind off things: They've brought him bakery from Mousey's. They've brought him soup from Watty's. Buzzy has performed his Senator D'Amato impression. Zee has danced naked to Armenian folk songs. One night they even brought Jean Jacques Bistrot over to play Trivial Pursuit. None of it has worked.

They even have tried to make him deal with his funk head on, reminding him that every color fades in popularity and that Serendipity Green® is, after all is said and done, just another color. They have assured him that there are still plenty of colors out there to be discovered. They have put his stack of un-cashed royalty checks next to his stack of J. Peterman catalogs, to show him what a lucky bastard he really is. Buzzy has shaken him by the shirt collar. Zee has reached under his Serendipity Green® bathrobe and shaken him by the testicles. They have even reminded him of Dr. Pirooz Aram's admonishment that he not confuse his fear of getting depressed with actually being depressed. None of this has worked.

And so they are racing along the back of a Pennsylvania mountain.

Frightened by the prospect of Pennsylvania food, Zee Levant and Buzzy decide to go hungry until they reach Cleveland. Food depravation has a certain Zenness to it, they decide. But is Cleveland food likely to be any more edible than Pennsylvania food? Not likely. They will set a good example for Hugh and confront their fears. They choose a truck stop called Spunky's. It takes five minutes to coax Hugh Harbinger out of the back seat. It is mid-afternoon but there are still breakfast menus on the sticky table. Zee decides she'll order the Belgian waffles and maybe some hot tea. Buzzy thinks he'll get the French toast and a tomato juice. “I bet they don't make the TJ fresh,” he says. Hugh Harbinger doesn't open his menu. Or his mouth. And his eyes are barely open. At least he's inside where they don't have to worry about him wedging his head under the tire of some monstrous truck.

Eventually the waitress gravitates toward their booth. Hugh's mouth falls open. His eyes fall open. By the look on his face, his heart has fallen open, too. “Oh Momma!” he says.

This is a truck stop. The waitress has heard worse. She gravitates closer. “Ready to order?”

Before Zee can ask about the Belgian waffles, before Buzzy can inquire about the TJ's freshness, Hugh rises and gently takes the waitress by the elbows. She is short, and slightly wide, and given her high cheekbones and her brownness and the flute-tone of her little voice, not likely a native Pennsylvanian. “What exactly are you?” he asks.

“Your waitress if you'll let me,” she says.

“I mean where are you from?”

“Peru. Why?”

“I've been there a dozen times,” says Zee Levant.

“You're Incan?” Hugh Harbinger asks.

The waitress warms. It is the first time a customer has not figured her for a Filipino or a Pakistani. “I am Incan, yes.”

“Your skin is fabulous,” he says. “Are all Incans your color?”

The waitress laughs. “They wish.” She tells him that she is from a village one hundred and forty-eight miles east of Cuzco. Iqicucho it is called, on the Rio Madre de Dios, too close to Bolivia for comfort. “Everyone in Iqicucho is this shade of brown,” she says. “Except for children whose mammas got too close to a Bolivian. It is said the people of Iqicucho are direct descendants of the great Incan emperor Pachacuti. Who knows if that is true. But it is true that no one in my family has a single drop of Spanish blood in them. Not a drop.”

“I've white-watered in Bolivia,” Zee Levant says.

“I pray nobody raped you,” the waitress says to her.

“You are the most incredible color,” Hugh Harbinger says. “Absolutely fabulous. I mean it.”

“The people in Puerto Maldonado call us potato skins because of our color,” the waitress says. “But they are all jealous assholes.”

Hugh must know her name.

“María Vilca Quechua Ayavilli,” she says. “I'm majoring in computer science at Penn State.”

Zee orders the Belgian waffles and hot tea.

Buzzy orders the French toast and TJ.

Hugh orders a cheeseburger, onion rings and a Pepsi with lots of ice. He writes the waitress's name on a napkin. And the name of her village, he writes that, too.

Dr. Pirooz Aram finishes his espresso in a few joyless swallows. His first patient of the day, a new patient, has showed up forty-five minutes early and his fidgety pacing and magazine flipping is driving him crazy. He ushers him in.

“Why are you so early?” Dr. Pirooz Aram asks in the same bewildered voice the great Persian king Xerxes might have used to berate the Greek general Themistocles after the horrendous naval debacle at Salamis: (“
Why did you sink all my boats?
”)

“Sorry,” D. William Aitchbone says.

“So am I,” answers Xerxes's descendant.

William Aitchbone sits rigidly in one of the huge leather chairs. He is smiling like a madman—which Dr. Pirooz Aram notes on his pad—and his fingers are drumming even faster than his eyes are blinking.

“I am surprised that you would come to me,” Dr. Aram begins, “considering that someone you despise recommended me.” The doctor is, of course, talking about Katherine Hardihood.

“I'm a lawyer,” Aitchbone explains. “I have plenty of clients who despise each other. But they know I won't betray their confidence. I gather you're a professional, too. Otherwise Katherine Hardihood wouldn't come to you. She may have more brass than a marching band, but she's nobody's fool.”

Dr. Pirooz Aram is flattered by his new patient's compliment, though he is glad his new patient does not know about his weakness for dancing and poetry. “So, why does such a cool cucumber as yourself need my help?” he asks, knowing from his sessions with Katherine that D. William Aitchbone is anything but a cool cucumber, that in fact he has gotten himself into quite a pickle in recent weeks.

For a half hour D. William Aitchbone talks proudly about his rise to prominence and power in Tuttwyler: about his successful law practice and his political apprenticeship under Donald Grinspoon; about his impressive Queen Anne on South Mill; about his marriage to Karen Brown, daughter of the local war hero Artie Brown, and the two great kids their union has produced; about his ascendancy to chairman of the Squaw Days Committee. Then in just thirty angry seconds he tells the doctor about his wife's illegitimate half-brother, Howie Dornick; how everything was banging along fine until Howie painted his ugly-ass little house Serendipity Green®, that ugly-ass color the entire world has mysteriously gone ga-ga over; how, for some unfathomable reason, his entire life has gone to hell-in-a hand-basket since Howie defiantly slathered his clapboards that color; how his wife has left him over an affair he is not having; how, because of that same affair he is not having, the wicked Victoria Bonobo is foisting the sure-to-be-impeached Vice President of the United States on him, ending any chance he has of becoming mayor; how the Bison-Prickert Paint Company bribed the village council with a fire engine so they could paint the gazebo Serendipity Green®; how, as the cameras were rolling, he snapped like a stale cookie and drove his car into that gazebo; how he got drunk on Miller Lite and smashed the Lionel Blue Comet his father gave him on his twelfth birthday; how some goofball Indian from Cleveland is on the warpath; how Katherine Hardihood plans to tell the world that Squaw Days is a sham. After he is finished telling the doctor all this, he staggers to the window and wraps his head in the doctor's expensive Persian drapes. “Why couldn't that bastard just paint his house white like everybody else? Such an easy fucking thing.”

Dr. Aram hurries over and pulls his patient's head out of the drapes, as delicately as a Girl Scout would remove a butterfly from the webbing of a net. “Perhaps you are taking things too personally. Maybe this Howie Dornick simply doesn't like white.”

“What he doesn't like is me.”

The doctor leads him back to the big leather chair. “You are what we in my native Iran call a
keer-khar
. A big man in town. A big cheese. Am I right?” He does not tell his patient that the term also refers to the impressive size of a donkey's penis, though he is tempted.

“There is nothing wrong with ambition,” Aitchbone says.

“Of course not. I am an ambitious man myself. But big cheeses get used to having their way. They rely on it. Plan on it. Then suddenly—boom! Somebody does something unexpected and all the roses you are sniffing turn to dogshit.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

Dr. Aram likes the unexpected religious reference. “Now you are blaming God for your misfortunes? I thought everything was Howie Dornick's fault?”

Aitchbone's head begins to bob. “Oh, it is.”

“Not even a little bit your fault?”

D. William Aitchbone calms instantly. His fingers stop drumming. His eyelids stop blinking. He smiles. It is not a maniacal smile, but a sheepish smile. “Of course it's my fault. Why would I come to you if it wasn't? You charge more than I do for christsakes.”

Once again Dr. Pirooz Aram is as astonished as Xerxes. “So, already you and I are making progress.”

Aitchbone folds his hands under his nose. “I've miscalculated somewhere along the line, that's for sure.”

Dr. Aram erupts. “Miscalculated? I am a psychiatrist not a professor of mathematics! You want me to figure out where you miscalculated? That is why you come to me? Not to repent? Not for self-realization? Not for transcendence? Not to get your head on straight? You are a
keer-khar
all right, Mr. D. William Aitchbone. A very big one. And I'm not talking cheese.”

Aitchbone checks his watch. “I thought maybe you could prescribe some pills.”

Now it is Dr. Pirooz Aram who staggers to the window and wraps his head in the expensive drapery. “Pills? All you Americans ever want are goddamn pills!”

D. William Aitchbone reaches for his checkbook. “How many sessions do you think this will take? Three? Four? Squaw Days is in five weeks. If I'm not on top of my game by then, I'm toast politically.”

When the Greeks sank the Persian fleet at Salamis, Xerxes impetuously had his own officers beheaded. It was a big mistake, a mistake that prevented Persia from civilizing the world, as God had intended. Instead that honor went to the Greeks, and then to successive empires of barbaric Europeans: To the Romans. To the Christian Crusaders. To the English. To the French. To the Spaniards. To the Americans. So Dr. Pirooz Aram knows that if he is to civilize the civilizers, he must not be impetuous like Xerxes was. He is, as the
keer-khar
has pointed out, a professional. So, while he wants to throw the
keer-khar
out on his donkey ears, he pulls his head from the drapes and playfully musses the
keer-khar's
hair. “Perhaps a lawyer like yourself can undo somebody's mistakes in three or four sessions, but your mistakes are not legal mistakes, my friend. They are mistakes of the soul. Who knows? Squaw Days might come and go a half-dozen times before that terrible soul of yours is mended. In the meantime I will prescribe some pills for you, as you wish.”